A Handmade Wilderness

1. Finding it

The dream that Willie and I had was to own land in the country. But not just any land. Not, for example, some cute little cabin in a resort development, and most definitely not the sort of secluded three-acre lot in the wilds of exurbia that is presently gobbling up even more of rural America than suburban sprawl itself. In its specialized way, our dream was more ambitious than that. Before we got together, Willie had never seen anything greener than New Orleans’s City Park in his whole life, but the idea of the country entranced him. He wanted to grow things, and he loved all shapes and sizes of animals (except, back then, snakes). It thrilled him that he might have as neighbors creatures he had only seen in the Audubon Zoo or on TV nature shows. Also, he had a taste for living adventurously. As for me, I was an amateur environmental activist who loved the natural world and wanted to protect it and live close to it, at least on a part-time basis. Together, our enthusiasms added up to a great yearning to have our own private nature reserve, a place that would be a haven, not just for us, but for the flora and fauna that would share it with us.

What we needed, obviously, was a pretty sizable chunk of countryside; enough space so we could be in touch with the natural world without moving it out when we moved in. But when we started our search, we didn’t know how much space was enough, or where to look for it. Or, most crucial of all, how much we could afford to buy. Willie was a floor sander and I an assistant professor at a state university. Which is to say that we could be classified, at best, among the country’s Taxable Poor. Moreover, like all good Americans, we were in debt. We had just finished fixing up a neglected house in one of New Orleans’s many wonderful old neighborhoods, and the bills were still coming in.

It took us a while but we eventually concluded that, this side of a homestead in Alaska, we were not going to be able to afford a large slice of some scenic natural wonderland. In the Deep South, as in most of the more heavily populated regions of the nation, pristine wild land is almost nonexistent, and what little is left ought to be, and sometimes is, protected from any kind of human settlement. But, guided by real estate agents, we did find some large tracts of private land for sale that would have suited us just fine. Places that were within a couple of hours’ drive of New Orleans, furnished with magnolias and mossy oaks, and usually situated along the banks of some lovely stream or bayou. But you pay extra for rustic scenery. At the going prices, the amount of land we could afford would have been barely enough to accommodate us, a pair of mockingbirds, a few squirrels, and maybe half a raccoon.

It took us a couple of months of that sort of window shopping before we decided to face reality. We could buy some tiny bit of real estate that already looked the way we wanted it to look, or we could (maybe) buy a decent-size piece of land that didn’t; but we couldn’t have both. From that realization evolved another: that land, like the half-wrecked old house we had restored in the city, could be rehabilitated. There was, however, one big difference: a piece of land, unlike a house, would do most of the restoration work itself if we just gave it enough time.

We adjusted our expectations accordingly. We would settle not just for any second- or third-best land, but for as much of what Willie called the least worst land as we could afford to buy at the cheapest price. No doubt a certain measure of sour grapes went into that decision, but we were excited by it, too. We had posed ourselves a challenge and then taken ourselves up on it. Whatever else, we were in for an adventure!

There are millions of acres of least worst land available in this country, much of it within reasonable commuting distance of large cities. It is land that wears the heavy scars of human abuse, land that is not near coastal beaches or pretty inland lakes or fashionable ski slopes—land that the developers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot surveyor’s pole. It is the stony gray hills of the Northeast, covered with thin third-growth woods; the overgrown pastures and fields of abandoned farms in the Carolinas; the ravaged sites of former strip mines in the Alleghenies; the unirrigated prairie corners of the Midwestern corn belt; the near desert of expired sheep ranches in west Texas and New Mexico; the dry scrublands east of the Cascades. It is the sort of land that has to be envisioned in terms of what it once was and could be again. The sort of land that desperately needs to be loved and protected, and rarely is.

Here in the Deep South, land like that is almost always composed of pinelands or hardwood bottomlands from which virtually all the marketable timber has been stripped. There are thousands of acres of that kind of cutover woodland available for sale at any given time, but Willie and I had a hard time finding a piece of it that was right for us. The real estate agents on the Mississippi Gulf Coast never did catch on to what we wanted. They were bemused when we said that we actually preferred land that had some swampy ground on it, that we didn’t care if the timber had been recently cut, that we definitely didn’t want frontage on a paved road. And no, we weren’t interested in a property with a dwelling on it, unless it was an old country homeplace we could fix up ourselves. They did their unimaginative best. They showed us twenty-acre pine plantations with the young trees lined up like soldiers; they showed us small farms with ranchette houses; and, inevitably, they showed us more of the streamside properties we had already decided we couldn’t afford.

Finally, they and we gave up on each other with mutual sighs of relief, and we went land hunting on our own. What we did first was buy U.S. Geological Survey maps of areas that, judging from ordinary road maps, seemed to be not too heavily populated and at the same time not too far from New Orleans. These days you can purchase aerial satellite photos from NASA of any tract that interests you, blown up to whatever size you want. But those old survey maps served us well enough. They were incredibly detailed, indicating not just land elevations and main roads, but the location of every dwelling, pond, streamlet, and dirt track to be found in a given quad at the time the map was drawn. With these for guides, Willie and I, in the company of Schaeffer, our fawn Great Dane, and Sammie, our thoroughbred mutt, roved the back roads of southwest Mississippi in our Volksbus for half a dozen winter weekends in a row. We checked out faded For Sale signs nailed to fenceposts at the edge of weedy pastures and burned-over woodlots. We accosted local people in the front yards of their trailer homes, asking them if they knew of anyone roundabout who was trying to unload some property. Sometimes all we got was a suspicious look that passed from my white face to Willie’s black one, but sometimes we were rewarded with a name and directions to someone’s house.

During those weekends, we tramped a lot of parcels of land. We were like Goldilocks: even the most likely properties didn’t quite fit; they were too large or too small or too expensive or too close to the neighbors or too ecologically bland. Yet, all along we felt that we were getting warmer, that the just-right property was out there, waiting for us, and sooner or later we would connect with it.

Meantime, we were learning just what least worst land meant in practical terms, and what it cost per acre. Even more important, we were getting some idea of how much land would be the minimum needed to create the sort of pocket-size nature reserve we had in mind. In different regions of the country, and in different ecological zones within those regions, that minimum can vary greatly. In calculating it, there are a lot of factors that have to be considered: Is the acreage for sale likely to become an island surrounded by other, more developed properties? In that case it will have to be much larger than an equivalent tract bounded, at least on one or two sides, by lands that are owned by a timber company or a government agency or a private conservation group, or that are just plain inaccessible due to the terrain. Does the tract offer, at least in potentia, a reasonable sampling of the area’s natural habitats? Does the aquifer allow for a water source that you can tap without losing your shirt paying for a well a couple of thousand feet deep? Above all, will the configuration of the land and its eventual vegetative cover offer enough seclusion for you, as well as adequate food and shelter for at least the more adaptable species of resident wildlife? You don’t have to be an Aldo Leopold to figure out that forty acres of mesquite in south Texas isn’t going to give you as much biodiversity as, say, a small, well-watered dale in southern Pennsylvania. On the other hand, you can probably buy half a dozen forties in south Texas (minus mineral rights, of course), for the price of one in the Northeast. Indeed, in that open country you would want to anyway, to keep your nearest neighbor from shooting at your jackrabbits and coyotes from his front porch.

Willie and I eventually decided that one south Mississippi forty might, just barely, serve our purpose. As it turned out, however, we ended up buying twice that much. Later we would be glad we did, even though at the time it put us that much more into hock. What happened was that one chilly, rainy day in December, we were out questing once again, and we ended up on a particularly wet, muddy dirt road that snaked this way and that in its not very successful effort to avoid the many narrow creek bottoms that tried to intercept it. Now Volksbuses are not noted for their traction in slippery situations such as this, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when ours embarked on a long slide while I was trying to get around an especially sharp curve.

Uh-oh, said Willie, pressing his hands against the dashboard. Sammie, easily rattled, hopped into his lap. Even Schaeffer, usually the most imperturbable of dogs, looked concerned.

For a few seconds everything was out of control, with the Volksbus skating perilously close to the edge of a deep drainage ditch. Then the road, though not the Volksbus, straightened out, bringing into view two men standing right in the middle of it. To judge from the expressions on their faces, they had never seen a Volksbus driven sideways before. They both carried shotguns, and their first impulse, as we swooped down on them, was to point the guns in our direction rather than jump aside. Luckily, the bus came to a halt—still facing sideways—a few feet from where they stood ankle deep in mud.

Hi, I said, giving them my very best effort at a disarming smile.

They didn’t reply, but they did lower their guns.

All things considered, they were not the sort one would want one’s sister to date. Low brows, sullen eyes, paleolithically slouching shoulders. For several seconds they just stood there, slowly sizing us up. No doubt we did seem an unlikely quartet to be roaming the backwoods of Mississippi: Willie, trim, handsome, black; Schaeffer, large even by Great Dane standards, pressing his dark mask against a back window; Sammie, barking ferociously from the safety of Willie’s lap; myself, flummoxed and no doubt citified-looking, trying hard to think of something folksy and friendly to say.

On Schaeffer’s account a bit of light finally flickered in the men’s eyes. Evidently they had never seen a Great Dane before.

One of them asked, What’s he good fer?

Well, I mumbled, he’s, uh, sort of a pet.

The light in the two pairs of eyes went out. I might as well have told them he was an objet d’art. Of course, I added defensively, he’s a very good watchdog. Which was not exactly true. Then, to change the subject, I asked them what they were hunting.

Deers.

That’s great, I said. I meant it, too. It wasn’t that I had any enthusiasm for deer hunting, but I was glad to learn that there was a population of deer hereabouts that was numerous enough to hunt. I had hoped there might be; but there were also a good many humans living along the back roads we were exploring and, just judging from first impressions, I suspected that even the adaptable whitetail might find it hard to coexist with them.

Any luck? I asked.

Naw, they said.

As though to confirm this observation, the air suddenly turned loud with a fanfare of complaining yaps and yelps. The next instant the van was surrounded by a swirling pack of black and tan deer hounds. They ignored Sammie’s yammering, but when aristocratic Schaeffer, confronted with this canine rabble, uttered a contemptuous Woof, they did their excited best to climb through the windows.

The spectacle was too much for Willie. They don’t like him being so high and mighty, he laughed. And when Schaeffer woofed again, even the two men had to grin. He do look like a deer, said one of them.

You’re right. Ha, ha, I answered, beginning, on that benign note, to carefully back the Volksbus around in the midst of houndish chaos. I figured we had had enough country motoring for one day. But when at last we were about-faced, I asked the hunters the question I had asked so many times during these last weeks: You wouldn’t know if anyone has some land for sale around here, would you?

Pause. Then one of the men answered, Well, you might could try Old Man Stanton. Lives about five miles south on the hardtop. He’s got a bunch a pieces all out in here.

We did try Old Man Stanton, who turned out to be a spry, round little gentleman in his seventies, with a habit of appending wicked little chuckles to everything he said. And, yes, he had a few pieces of land in the neighborhood that he had acquired during the Depression as payment on defaulted loans. Right off he seemed to understand what we were looking for in the way of bargain-basement property, perhaps because that was the only kind he owned. He told us to come back the following Saturday. When we did, he donned old-fashioned army leggings (Snakes, y’know, heh, heh) and energetically led the way on a day-long progress during which we toured a forty here, then an eighty over there, then another forty just down the road a little ways, heh, heh.

By late that drizzly afternoon, after we had slogged across what must have been miles of beige meadows, plundered pine woods, and flooded gulleys, even Mr. Stanton admitted to being a mite give out. The supply of his scattered holdings was giving out too. Wearily, we climbed out of the car to have a look at the last property, an eighty, that he had to show us.

It was the Place.

2. Taking an inventory

Nowadays if you are shopping around for a private nature reserve you shouldn’t have too much trouble turning up some ecological information about the area of the country where you are conducting your search. There are regional guidebooks, often published by university presses, that will help you identify wildflowers, trees, birds, reptiles—even insects. And state wildlife agencies and environmental groups can give you advice about the preferred foods and habitat requirements of many wildlife species. So even before you start looking for the right place, you can begin educating yourself about how to take an ecological inventory once you find it.

When Willie and I first laid eyes on the Place more than a quarter of a century ago, much of that sort of information was unavailable. And we were such rank amateurs when it came to natural history that trying to assess the environmental value of what we were buying was largely a matter of hit and miss. Besides, it was winter. A snowless Deep South winter, to be sure, but still not the best time of year to be trying to identify obscure wildflowers on the basis of a bunch of withered stalks, or indigenous birds that were probably vacationing in the Yucatan, or a species of tree that, leafless, looked like every other scraggly old tree in sight. Considering the odds, Willie and I were pretty lucky to figure out the potential of the Place as well as we did.

God knows, our Promised Land didn’t look all that promising on that dreary December day. What it did look was big. To a couple of city rubes, a tract one-half of a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide seemed a vast expanse of real estate. As the buzzard flies, it lay about twenty-five miles back from the Gulf Coast in a relatively narrow belt of gently rolling land known locally as the sandhills. During the Pleistocene epoch, between 1 and 1.5 million years ago, ancient rivers shaped its modest ridges and hills out of the alluvial clay and sand they had carried with them in their southward progress.

Silviculturists can’t say with absolute certainty whether the upland forests that took over here as interglacial seas withdrew were dominated by hardwoods, notably the majestic live oak, or by that most durable and noble-looking of Southern pines, the longleaf. The longleaf’s special genius lies in its ability to survive forest fires when it is just a little sprout, with its tufty head barely poking above ground. Young oaks are not fortunate enough to have this immunity. However, if they manage to grow tall enough to make a parasol of their dense evergreen foliage before a forest fire catches up with them, then shade-tolerant shrubs and hardwood saplings, including more oaks, spring up under them. In time, these crowd out sun-loving pine seedlings and grasses; and without dry grass and pine straw to feed upon, fires find it increasingly difficult to invade these hardwood enclaves.

Back in the old days, the frequency with which forest fires occurred would have been the crucial factor in determining whether oaks or pines got the upper hand, at least on the dry and sandy upland slopes. Given the exceptionally high incidence of electrical storms in this region, as well as the Choctaws’ practice of periodically setting fires to improve habitat for deer and other game, big burns must have been pretty commonplace around here long before the white man showed up; so it seems likely that in most areas the longleafs had the upper hand, a probability supported by the few accounts left by early travelers in this region. But whether the wilderness that covered the sandhills was overwhelmingly dominated by starkly vertical barrens of towering pines, or divvied up between them and sprawling Sherwood Forests of massive oaks, it must have been something really wondrous to see.

In terms of human exploitation, these forests were, and still are, the only important natural resource that the sandhills can boast. The thin, sandy loam topsoils, highly acidic and nutrient poor, are ill-suited for anything but subsistence agriculture; and no mineral wealth has been found beneath the underlying hard clay pan. This poverty of resources explains the poverty of the sandhills’ human history. Even before most of the tribes of the Choctaw Nation were deported to Oklahoma’s Indian Territory in the 1840s, they apparently used this area only sporadically, preferring the richer hunting grounds of the alluvial river bottomlands that intersect the sandhills to the east and west. It was a preference shared by early white settlers in this region. Although records of white settlement along the Gulf and the coastal rivers go back to 1699, when Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’lberville, founded Old Biloxi, this backcountry remained largely uninhabited for almost two hundred years thereafter. No Taras, no Scarletts, no armies of cotton-picking slaves; only a few isolated homesteads with dogtrot cabins, corn cribs and rail fences, staked out by people who, for one reason or another, had no choice but to settle here. Even during the Civil War the sandhills were a territorial no man’s land, not considered much worth fighting over; the most that local tradition can lay claim to is a small stream near the Place called Confederate Creek, where, it is said, a small band of Southern cavalrymen sometimes hid their horses when they weren’t out raiding.

By the late 1800s, however, the epic plundering of the Deep South’s pine forests—what timbermen still call The Big Cut —was reaching into southern Mississippi. Timber barons unleashed armies of tree cutters, both black and white, onto lands they leased or bought for next to nothing. The railroad companies (which acquired more than a million Mississippi acres as rights of way) built hundreds of miles of track for the sole purpose of transporting lumber. The first inland town in these parts was founded in 1898 when a large sawmill and turpentine kiln were set up at a crossroads fifteen miles south of what is now the Place to tap the area’s seemingly limitless supply of timber and pine resin. In its heyday, during and right after the First World War, it was a bustling community that boasted a thousand homes, a fifty-room hotel, even a movie theatre. Yet within a decade this little boomtown had become almost a ghost town, surrounded by a clear-cut wasteland that by then encompassed all of southern Mississippi. When Willie and I appeared on the scene forty years later, the town survived as an eyeblink roadside hamlet, with nothing to show of the mill or hotel or any of the other monuments to greed and short-term planning that had first brought people here. Most of its former inhabitants had moved on, but there were still some old-timers around who, in their youth, had taken part in the dismantling of the local forests, including those on the very acres we now owned. They still remembered the gut-wrenching labor of bringing down pines more than one hundred feet tall and four feet in diameter; the long teams of straining oxen dragging the huge logs out of the woods; the narrow gauge railway systems on which they were hauled over hill and dale to the mills. Our next-to-nearest neighbor, Hovit Bodner, showed us the site in a hollow, marked by a few scattered bricks, where the lumbermen’s camp was located. And he described how the Place had looked after they departed —the hills so utterly laid bare that he had been able to see wagons passing on the road to the Coast, then a dirt track, more than a mile away.

Since then, under the none-too-gentle management of folks like Mr. Stanton, much of the Place and the land surrounding it had been cut over whenever a stand of pines got tall enough to beconverted into broomsticks, pulp, or creosote fence posts. Meanwhile, the local people were practicing a First World version of the Third World’s slash-and-burn syndrome. Unimpressed by the property rights of absentee landowners, they set the hills afire every spring to eliminate dry winter grass and pine straw, thereby inducing early grazing for their free-ranging herds of half-starved cattle.

This, then, was the much-exploited landscape that Willie and I were to embrace as our own private Shangri-la. Right off, we loved it. Partly because we were already seeing it as it could be. And partly because, in the way of stray dogs, it looked as if it could use some tender loving care. I don’t mean to suggest that the prospect the Place offered us was totally unprepossessing; not at all. But there was no denying that from some angles it did illustrate what least worst land was bound to look like.

Five sandy hills—ridges actually—lay wholly or partly across the Place like the fingers of a gouty hand. The knuckles of these hills, roughly aligned with the northern border of the property, were the highest elevations on the tract. The descending ridges, the fingers, tapered down to a narrow swampy creek, known as a brainch hereabouts, that lay along the southern boundary line. Of the four dales separating these ridges, the one between the broad thumb of high ground on the eastern property line and the next ridge, the index finger, was the widest. This was the hollow (which we named—what else?—the Hollow), where the lumber camp had once been located. The drainage ravines separating the other ridges were more steeply trenched by rain runoff, and varied in width from thirty feet to thirty yards. They were also wetter than the big hollow—miniature brainches, really—where rickety young stands of sweet bay and tupelo managed to survive the fires that annually swept the adjoining hills.

On the hills themselves there were some spots where the thin loamy topsoil was utterly gone, and the underlying hard yellow clay lay exposed like the top of a skull. Mostly, though, the upper slopes were covered by wild meadows of wire and bluestem grass, gallberry and briars; and wherever you looked, these open spaces were dotted by bright hairy green tufts, the irrepressible, troll-like seedlings of the longleaf pine.

Farther down the slopes, the second growth (actually third or fourth growth in most cases) was more advanced. Some of the stands of pines, though still pretty scrawny looking, would soon be eligible to end up as pages in the New York Times, but among them stood a few sizable longleafs, slash, and loblollies that the lumbermen had spared as seed trees. There was also a smattering of young red oaks and a good many clumps of their rather disreputable cousin, the scruffy-looking blackjack oak, a weed tree that actually prefers to grow in poor soils.

None of these landscape features was unique to the Place; in fact, they were common to all the tracts Mr. Stanton had shown us, and to the sandhills generally. But there were three places on the property that, even on that first day, we recognized as being special.

One of these was the pitcher plant bog—two bogs, actually, each about an acre and a half, separated by a narrow but dense brake of sweet bay, young cypress, and titi. Back when we bought the Place, these highly specialized ecohabitats were not considered threatened, as they are now; but even in winter—maybe especially because it was winter—we were struck by their absolute apartness from everything around them. Normally, the vegetation of contiguous ecological zones tends to merge and overlap somewhat where the zones meet. But the boundaries of the open, austere bogs were as emphatically demarcated as the perimeters of fairy rings. The line they drew between themselves and the hillside pines on the one side, the gray-green wall of the brainch on the other, was determined by a combination of factors that had to be just so; a mere inch or two of difference in elevation ensured that the sandy soil would be saturated with water for much of the year but rarely flooded. This sogginess, combined with a very high level of acidity and a paucity of nutrients, discouraged most plants and trees from taking root. Some of those that did, like the ground-hugging sundews and both the parrot and frog belly pitcher plants, had evolved into carnivores, capturing and ingesting nitrogenous insects in various sinister but ingenious ways as a means of making ends meet. Even in winter, wherever cattle had not trampled them, the desiccated shells of the tubular pitcher plants and the dry blooms of white-topped sedge, like burned-out stars, were perfectly intact. In among them a few slender young cypress posed like Balinese